CRITICS' CHOICE; New CDs: Cynic

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: December 1, 2008

CYNIC
''Traced in Air''
(Season of Mist)

Death metal scours the old values and meanings of song structure. Verse, chorus and bridge may remain, but if they do, they're not signifying in the normal ways: home, away, the development and draining of tension. There's lots of detail, lots of sections, but the music feels tense and dire all the way through. The drama, the moments of safety and release in a song's cycles, don't exist for it.

The band Cynic came out of death metal; its guitarist Paul Masvidal and its drummer Sean Reinert spent some time during the 1990s in the Florida band Death. At this point, though, Cynic has only a slender connection to death metal. It retains the same kind of ambivalence toward traditional song structure. It also has the genre's dated production values, with an underfed drum sound and glossy reverb overall.

But on ''Traced in Air'' -- Cynic's second album in 15 years and a totally unlikely comeback -- the welter of detail is about one quarter mathematically busy, earning its designation as ''progressive'' music, and three-quarters flamboyantly, outrageously beautiful. On the basis of ''Traced in Air,'' more so than its 1993 predecessor ''Focus,'' Cynic should be understood not so much alongside any metal bands but along with the radical harmonic progressives in the last 45 years of pop and jazz: composers like Milton Nascimento, the Beach Boys or Pat Metheny.

Crazy with melodies -- the serene vocals underscored occasionally by the growling death-metal vocals of Tymon Kruidenier, like a hidden trace of where the band came from -- ''Traced in Air'' tends to present them sequentially, in sudden shifts, like Paul McCartney at his messiest and most inventive.

There's a track toward the end of this short but action-packed album called ''King of Those Who Know.'' It begins with fingerpicked electric guitar and the multitracked voice of the folksinger Amy Correia, all establishing a motif; then it gives way to distorted electric guitar and Mr. Masvidal's voice, made choirboy-high through the digital process of a vocoder. There follow a few countermelodies, a crazy-fingers solo, a psychedelic bridge, a part with Mr. Masvidal's unprocessed singing, a Metheny-like solo-guitar ending with a soft-spoken tone. We're in a time when all music in flux. Still, this is a track that makes you wonder how songwriters can think so free of genre. BEN RATLIFF